The Map on the Guardian's Table

*A retelling based on **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum. Words in quotation marks are preserved in that account.*

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum remembered vividly how Shoghi Effendi worked on his own map of the goals of the Ten Year Plan.

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He was tired out and run down after a long winter's work in Haifa: the Shrine, the gardens, the pilgrims, the interminable and ever-increasing correspondence. With difficulty she had extracted from him what she calls "a quasi-promise" that when he took a cure at a well-known watering place he would really rest.

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The summer sun was shining outside, and the long leafy alleys of trees, through which one went to drink from the various waters at set times, were shady in the heat. Everything there, she writes, "beckoned to drowsy relaxation." Shoghi Effendi spent the hours of daylight leaning over his map, "filling in its details with infinite care." Her remonstrances had no effect, nor did the doctor's, nor her indignant reminder of his promise.

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He was, she writes, "wholly absorbed in his task, forgetful of tired muscles, strained eyes, overworked brain."

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He was already making maps as a youth. In a letter written from Beirut on 8 March 1914 to one of the Master's secretaries in Haifa, the seventeen-year-old reported: "I have pretty near finished the map of the United States of America." He asked for the list of the cities 'Abdu'l-Bahá had visited there, in order, so that he could locate them on it.

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The map of the Plan was built the same way, one name at a time. He had asked National Assemblies to send him the names of territories and major islands where Bahá'í activity was in progress, to supplement his own exhaustive list, which included the countries 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself had named in the Tablets of the Divine Plan, and which he had compiled with the aid of atlases and works of reference. The result called for 131 virgin territories to be opened to the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh in ten years, and for 118 territories already opened to be consolidated.

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The Crusade was launched during the Holy Year through four Intercontinental Teaching Conferences: Kampala in the spring of 1953, Chicago during Riḍván, Stockholm in the summer and New Delhi in the autumn. At Chicago alone well over a hundred believers offered themselves as pioneers.

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Those who first reached a virgin territory received from him the title "Knight of Bahá'u'lláh." In September 1953 he announced the first names he had inscribed on a Roll of Honour, which he planned, when it was completed, to place under the floor at the entrance of Bahá'u'lláh's Holy Tomb at Bahjí. Nine months after the Crusade opened, almost ninety territories had been opened.

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He followed individual pioneers closely. Ella Bailey, an elderly woman who was physically disabled, longed to go to North Africa as a pioneer, and Shoghi Effendi encouraged her. Rúḥíyyih Khánum records that "the place where Ella Bailey died is marked with a gold star on one of his maps."

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In the autumn of 1957 he went to London to buy a few more things for the newly completed Archives building before returning to Haifa in November. An epidemic of Asiatic influenza was sweeping Europe, and both he and his wife fell ill with it. The attack was not particularly severe, though he had quite a high fever for a few days, and the doctor insisted that he not leave London until he had been free of fever for a week. He read a great deal in bed and attended to his mail and cables.

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When a week had passed since the illness began, he was at work on his last map, the one he called "the half-way point of the Ten Year Crusade." He had asked for a large table to be put in his room so that he could spread it out, and for hours he worked at it, checking figures and data with her against the many notes he kept on the state of the Crusade all over the world.

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She begged him to wait a few days, until he felt stronger.

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"No, I must finish it, it is worrying me," he said. "There is nothing left to do but check it. I have one or two names to add that I have found in this mail, and I will finish it today."

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As he worked he repeated what she had so often heard him say in the last years of his life: "This work is killing me! How can I go on with this? I shall have to stop it. It is too much. Look at the number of places I have to write down. Look how exact I have to be!"

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When it was done he was tired, and went back to his bed, where he sat and read reports.

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Early in the morning of 4 November he suffered a coronary thrombosis. When Rúḥíyyih Khánum went to his room to ask how he was, she did not at first recognize that he was dead. "His eyes were half-open with no look of pain, alarm or surprise in them."

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For more than five years the Bahá'ís carried the Crusade forward without him, and brought it to its triumphal conclusion in 1963.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.*

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